The luxury homes in Foxhall Crescents were built on the site of the hilly 25 acre estate of Nelson Rockefeller in the 1980s. The community is just minutes to Georgetown, the White House, Reagan Airport, the Kennedy Center, and the Battery Kemble hiking trails. Prices range from around $2 million.
History of the Luxury Homes in Foxhall Crescents
Nelson Rockefeller’s estate was sold in 1977 for $5.5 million to developers Allen Rozansky and Alan Kay. The sale dismayed some of the neighbors like former CIA director Richard Helms, David Lloyd Kreeger, chairman of GEICO, and socialite and philanthropist Gwendolyn Cafritz. They were among neighbors who vowed to block the development. (Ironically the Cafritz family made its fortune building affordable homes throughout Washington from 1916 through the 1980s.)
The architect for the project was Arthur Cotton Moore, a Washington institution in himself, a sixth-generation Washingtonian, a graduate of St. Albans School and Princeton University. Moore turned for inspiration to an earlier housing project: the Royal Crescent, completed in Bath, England, in 1774 in selecting a design for the new Foxhall community.
The Royal Crescent — designed by an architect known as John Wood, the Younger — comprises 30 rowhouses that present a seamless, colonnaded facade of honey-colored stone. As the name implies, the facade is curved. The Royal Crescent is one continuous building but Foxhall Crescents is made up of detached houses arranged around circular streets. Front yards are just a few feet deep (if at all) and backyards are small. The lots range from approximately 8000 square feet to nearly half an acre. A few homes are built on double lots.
The Design of these Luxury Homes in Foxhall Crescents
The original Arthur Cotton Moore homes at Foxhall Crescents were designed with nine different floorplans, all in cast stone and pale brick, with a Palladian front. Some of the houses have facades that are concave or convex, depending on what side of the street they’re on. Because of the hilly site, homes on one side of the street have three levels in front, two in back; on the other side of the street, it’s two in front, three in back. A few homes were built later in Foxhall Crescents in a more classic Georgian style. Those homes are equally large.
The original set of homes was built by Crowell and Baker, another Washington institution. They ranged in size from slightly under 3000 square feet to 4,700 square feet, all with circular staircases, some with elevators. In the early 1980s, the homes were priced from around $400,000 to close to $700,000. Today, they range from approximately $2 million to $3 million.
What is Near Foxhall Crescents
There are four entrances to the Foxhall Crescents, Eastgate, Westgate, Southgate and Battery Kemble Gate, creating non-contiguous circles. Even though you enter these separate sections of Foxhall Crescents either from Foxhall Road, 46th Street, 48th Street or 49th Street — all the homes have Foxhall Crescent NW addresses. You just can here from there without going out of the community and starting over again! That probably drives the Amazon delivery people crazy!
Foxhall Crescents is close to Georgetown, the Kennedy Center, the White House and the Potomac River. It is just a few blocks from the German Embassy, St Patrick’s school and church, the Lab School, and the Field School.
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